Translated by Stefania Madera
Why continue making cinema in stop motion when alternatives are easier, economic and digital exist? Wilwood, the new film of the Laika studio documents an industry that seems to not to remember the value of inefficiency.
To make an eagle fly, at Laika they first had to actually construct it. The big Wildwood raptor has 3.794 plumes applied one for one and, to animated it an animator had to adjust the creature’s feathers, frame for frame with a patience that today it would seem more adapt to preservation than a blockbuster. The film also features 728 handcrafted trees and beyond 142 thousand replacement faces for the characters.
All of this could be mistaken for a massive form of artistic self-sabotage. Besides, the question that accompanies every new production in stop motion is not how they pull off, but why they continue to try on.
Under the direction of Travis Knight, Wildwood is the adaptation of Colin Meloy’s novel, the Decemberists’ singer, illustrated by Carson Ellis. Prue, the main character, enters a prohibited forest on the outskirts of Portland to find her little brother whisked away by a murder of crows. There are talking animals, warring factors and an entire world that seems to exist independently of the story. Laika, Coraline and Kubo and the two strings’ studio, started to imagine the project approximately sixteen years earlier of his birth. Knight claimed he did not yet have the tools to make it. In other words, he waited until technology was advanced enough to allow him to continue working by hand.
This is the paradox of Wildwood. Stop motion is a productive method that seems to be designed to challenge any business plan. Moving a puppet by a few millimeters, a frame is shot, and the process starts all over again. The movement that in the screen lasts for a single second, in the set can take up hours. There is no undo button to undo yesterday’s pose. The lights change, the materials offer resistance, a single wrong detail can mean starting all over again.
Indeed, it comes at a cost. Laika doesn’t reveal the budget of Wildwood, but his feature films can require finances in the order of 60-100 millions of dollars. This is also the first film of the studio after seven years. In a system that measures every product on the capacity to anticipate, to cost less and generate enough content to keep us from switching platforms, such a pace of work can seem like a provocation.
But assigning a moral value to slowness would be an easy way out. It doesn’t mean that the story authomatically improves because an artisan spent three weeks on a leg, neither that digital animation is less human: also this is product of decisions, skills, mistakes and work. Wildwood doesn’t refuse the computer. It utilizes full colors 3D printing, visual effects and advanced digital tools to create the very faces that are then replaced by hand. Rather than a war between past and future, it is a somewhat peculiar collaboration between the laboratory and the machine.
What shift is the relation of the imagine with the physical world. Laika’s character cast really a shadow on the ground. A jacket creases because it’s made by something. Even when the scene digitally touch up, a lingering, vague sensation that you could almost touch it persists. This is not realism: it’s presence. Perhaps in a period, in which pictures are increasingly easy to reproduce, knowing that something occupied a space and a gesture is required, becomes part of the experience to watch it.
However, there is a less poetic detail that earns its place in the frame. Laika is supported by Knight family, bound to Nike’s fortune. The freedom to dedicate years to a work so highly inefficient does not an opportunity available to everyone. Also the market’s logical resistance, often, needs of a substantial heritage enough to afford it. It’s difficult to transform this model in a recipe to save the cinema.
A more precise question then remains: what the method includes to what we see? The answer it is not just about the astonishment of the numbers, but in the small indecisions of a movement, in the body that seem slightly out of place, in a fantasy world that doesn’t want be matter.
The labor of Wildwood doesn’t prove that we must return to doing everything by hand. It serves as a more modest reminder that not every innovation consist in remove a burden. Sometimes it consists in choose which hardships are still worth preserving.
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